New Cloud Platform Cost Transparency Features

SAP Cloud Platform continuously improves capabilities not just around the technical features set of services, but also enterprise readiness for the platform itself. In this blog we would like to present the new cost transparency feature delivered in the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit. Customers have the challenges to distribute costs for different programs, projects, departments etc. This gap is now closed with the new cost transparency feature.

New Functions & Features

The existing export of the usage data of your global accounts now includes cost relevant information, which will be described in detail in this blog.

The previous export included two worksheet tabs in the MS Excel download: “Global Account Info” and “Service Usage”. These two worksheets are still existing with only a minor change of the name from “Service Usage” to “Actual Usage”.

With the cost transparency features two new worksheets are available in the export file: “Global Account Costs” and “Subaccount Costs by Service”.

Cost Transparency: Step-by-Step

In the first step the aggregated usage of all service plans from all subaccounts is shown in the “Global Accounts Costs” worksheet. This gives an overview how the consumption of the services over time changed and which services are used.

The second step is the costs on Subaccount level. These costs can be distributed to the owners of the subaccount, e.g. subsidiaries, projects via cost centers, profit centers, WBS elements, etc.)

Example: Use Case – Manufacturer with IoT devices

A manufacturer is offering an end-to-end smart solution  (see use case Creating Smart Business Models in Manufacturing with the SAP Cloud Platform Internet of Things Service and SAP HANA Service) to three different customer segments. In this use case we will have a detailed view, how SAP HANA service and SAP Cloud Platform Internet of Things are reflected from an Subaccount usage perspective, but also how the costs look like on an aggregated Global Account view as well as on distributed costs on Subaccount level.

There are three different Subaccounts to reflect the different device needs of the customer segments. Currently there are

• 490 devices and 64 GB HANA in Subaccount Retail,
• 510 devices and 32 GB HANA in Digital and
• 20 Devices | 32 GB HANA in Subaccount Direct.

The Metric is “Devices in Blocks of 100“ for IoT and „GB Memory“ and „GB Storage“ for HANA service for April 2019.

Costs on Aggregated Global Account Level

On the worksheet “Global Account Costs” the  respective costs on service plan level are displayed.

Please be aware that the service plan costs are depending on the date, when you your Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) started. The historical prices are available under following link CPEA Price List. You can find your contract start date in SAP Cloud Platform cockpit → <your global account> → Overview → Cloud Credits Usage.

Subaccount Costs by Service

With the worksheet “Subaccount Costs by Service” all respective costs per Subaccount on a service level plan can be distributed to the owner. The owner of a Subaccount could be for example subsidiaries, projects, departments, etc. These costs could be booked to WBS elements, cost centers, profit centers etc.

Please be aware that some services offer volume discounts and could have lower prices on “Subaccount Costs by Service” level like:

• Application Runtime
• Document Information Extraction
• Enterprise Messaging
• Identity Authentication
• Identity Provisioning
• Internet of Thing
• Leonardo IoT
• Object Store Service
• SAP Conversational AI
• SAP EA Designer, cloud edition
• SAP Edge Services
• SAP Intelligent RPA
• SAP Market Rates Management
• Service Ticket Intelligence
• Workflow

This list is only an extract, new CPEA services can have also volume discounts and added continuously to this list.

An example how a worksheet could look like with usage from the use case above: